Why Socrates Kant Get Ryled

Philosophers get some namechecks in DC Comics this week. First, from Simon Dark #5 (author: Steve Niles):

Simon Dark and Red Tornado – So, have you told your dad yet?

– Are you kidding? No way! He’d lock me up!

– I don’t believe that.

– Dad’s cool generally. But he’s a rationalist. You know, like Socrates, Kant? This stuff with Simon is waay out of his framework.

– Kant? How old are you again?

Next, android superhero Red Tornado’s musings in Justice League of America #18 (author Alan Burnett):

The British philosopher Gilbert Ryle did not believe in mind/body dualism. He ridiculed the entire concept, dismissively referring to it as “the ghost in the machine.” And yet, here is my mind, existing in a computer. And there is my body, broken spare parts spread out on a table, irreparable. I am that ghost.

Now I’m not sure why being a rationalist in the tradition of Socrates and Kant should be an obstacle to dealing with Simon Dark. It’s hard to imagine Socrates being phased by much of anything. As for Kant, if Simon were really outside the framework of reason, then he wouldn’t be an object of possible experience, right? I suspect Niles has too narrow a notion of what a ratuionalist’s framework can accommodate.

Gilbert Ryle With regard to the Red Tornado’s predicament, I’m not sure that Ryle (who actually might well count as a dualist by today’s standards, though of course not a substance dualist) would have any problem with Red’s status as Burnett describes it – though Ryle might prefer to say that the computer is (now) Red’s body and that the spare parts on the table are not. (Ryle no doubt would put up some resistance, however, to sorcerer Zatanna’s telling Red, once a new body has been prepared for him: “The Brainiacs will transfer your program, but I have to cast a mystic spell that moves your soul.”)

When people hear that Ryle was against the “ghost in the machine” model of mind and body, they tend to assume that he wanted to eliminate the ghost, leaving only the machine. But Ryle rejects the machine as much as the ghost; he sees human beings as organic unities of mind and body, not as an accidental conjunction of an essentially mental thingy and an essentially mechanistic thingy, and he is as opposed to traditional materialism as to traditional dualism. Despite his sometimes behaviourist-sounding language (and his arguably veering a bit too close to behaviourism itself), Ryle is fundamentally much closer to Aristotle, Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein, and the phenomenologists than to contemporary materialism – stressing the mutual inextricability of mind and body rather than the ontological or explanatory privileging of one over the other. (Dennett’s contemporary appropriation of Ryle is a confusion, methinks; Dennett and Ryle are not ultimately on the same side.) Ryle’s Concept of Mind, despite its flaws, is still well worth reading.

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7 Responses to Why Socrates Kant Get Ryled

  1. iceberg February 24, 2008 at 9:11 pm #

    It’s hard to imagine Socrates being fazed by much of anything.

  2. Kelly D Jolley February 24, 2008 at 9:13 pm #

    Fun post, Rod. And quite right about Ryle. He once said that in his hurry to get off one boot (the ghost) off one foot, he put his other foot too firmly in the other boot (behaviorisim). He really wanted to go bootless.

  3. Kelly D Jolley February 24, 2008 at 9:14 pm #

    Fun post, Rod. And quite right about Ryle. He once said that in his hurry to get one boot (the ghost) off one foot, he put his other foot too firmly in the other boot (behaviorisim). He really wanted to go bootless.

  4. Administrator February 25, 2008 at 1:23 pm #

    It’s hard to imagine Socrates being fazed by much of anything.

    Oops. Thanks. I am a phailed proophreader.

  5. Administrator February 25, 2008 at 1:26 pm #

    He really wanted to go bootless.

    “Bootless and Rail-less”! There’s a title for some Wittgensteinian-inspired project.

  6. Brede Armozel February 26, 2008 at 11:13 pm #

    Fundamentally, the issue that I see with the dualist position is that it misidentifies the particular nature of emergent systems. What a thing is may not be exactly reducible to any essence; materialistic or not. It’s rather a puzzling problem, because it’s more important to fields of meteorology, when they ask where does one weather system end and another begin? Why do the near perfect conditions in one case of weather not produce a storm (not even a shower), but in some rare cases the most unlikely conditions for it will produce a hurricane? Such cases apply equally to the issue of the mind; where does it begin and the body end? Is there such a clear division? And is it an illusion?

    I think the answer is close if you answer emergence, but there’s definitely more, but what it is I can’t answer yet.

  7. Administrator February 27, 2008 at 4:48 pm #

    the issue that I see with the dualist position

    Well, what dualist position? Ryle counts either as a dualist or as an anti-dualist, depending on how one defines “dualism.” And ditto for “materialist.”

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